Intrusive Brain Reading Surveillance Technology:

Hacking the Mind

http://www.globalresearch.ca/intrusive-brain-reading-surveillance-technology-

hacking-the-mind/7606

By Carole Smith Global Research, December 13, 2007

Dissent Magazine, Australia, Summer 2007/2008 13 December 2007 Theme: Police State & Civil Rights, Science and Medicine

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“Carole Smith describes claims that neuroscientists are developing brain scans that can

read people’s intentions in the absence of serious discussions about the ethical issues this

raises, despite the fact that the research has been backed by government in the UK and

US.” “We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain. Dr José Delgado.Director of Neuropsychiatry, Yale University Medical School Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118 February 24, 1974.

The Guardian newspaper, that defender of truth in the United Kingdom, published an article

by the Science Correspondent, Ian Sample, on 9 February 2007 entitled:

‘The Brain Scan that can read people’s intentions’, with the sub-heading: ‘Call for ethical

debate over possible use of new technology in interrogation”.

“Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out

something that from the outside there’s no way you could possibly tell is in there. It’s like

shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall”, the scientists were reported as

saying.

At the same time, London’s Science Museum was holding an exhibition entitled

‘Neurobotics: The Future of Thinking’. This venue had been chosen for the launch in

October 2006 of the news that human thoughts could be read using a scanner. Dr Geraint

Rees’ smiling face could be seen in a photograph at the Neurobotics website[1], under the

heading “The Mind Reader”. Dr Rees is one of the scientists who have apparently cracked

the problem which has preoccupied philosophers and scientists since before Plato: they had

made entry into the conscious mind. Such a reversal of human historical evolution,

announced in such a pedestrian fashion, makes one wonder what factors have been in

play, and what omissions made, in getting together this show, at once banal and

extraordinary. The announcement arrives as if out of a vacuum. The neuroscientist –

modern-style hunter-gatherer of information and darling of the “Need to Know” policies of

modern government – does little to explain how he achieved this goal of entering the

conscious mind, nor does he put his work into any historical context. Instead, we are asked

in the Science Museum’s programme notes:

How would you feel if someone could read your innermost thoughts? Geraint Rees of UCL

says he can. By using brain-imaging technology he’s beginning to decode thought and

explore the difference between the conscious and unconscious mind. But how far will it go?

And shouldn’t your thoughts remain your personal business?

If Dr Rees has decoded the mind sufficiently for such an announcement to be made in an

exhibition devoted to it, presumably somewhere is the mind which has been, and is

continuing to be, decoded. He is not merely continuing his experiments using functional

magnetic resolution scanning (fMRI) in the way neuroscientists have been observing their

subjects under scanning devices for years, asking them to explain what they feel or think

while the scientists watch to see which area lights up, and what the cerebral flow in the

brain indicates for various brain areas. Dr Rees is decoding the mind in terms of conscious

and unconscious processes. For that, one must have accessed consciousness itself.

Whose consciousness? Where is the owner of that consciousness – and unconsciousness?

How did he/she feel? Why not ask them to tell us how it feels, instead of asking us.

The Neurobotics Exhibition was clearly set up to make these exciting new discoveries an

occasion for family fun, and there were lots of games for visitors to play. One gets the

distinct impression that we are being softened up for the introduction of radical new

technology which will, perhaps, make the mind a communal pool rather than an individual

possession. Information technology seeks to connect us all to each other in as many ways

as possible, but also, presumably, to those vast data banks which allow government control

not only to access all information about our lives, but now also to our thoughts, even to our

unconscious processing. Does anyone care?

One of the most popular exhibits was the ‘Mindball’ game, which required two players to go

literally head-to-head in a battle for brainpower, and used ‘brainpower’ alone. Strapped up

with headbands which pick up brain waves, the game uses neurofeedback, but the person

who is calm and relaxed wins the game. One received the impression that this calmness

was the spirit that the organisers wished to reinforce, to deflect any undue public panic that

might arise from the news that private thoughts could now be read with a scanner.[2] The

ingress into the mind as a private place was primarily an event to be enjoyed with the family

on an afternoon out:

Imagine being able to control a computer with only the power of your mind. Or read people’s

thoughts and know if they’re lying. And what if a magnetic shock to the brain could make

you more creative…but should we be able to engineer our minds?

Think your thoughts are private? Ever told a lie and been caught red-handed? Using brain-

scanning technology, scientists are beginning to probe our minds and tell if we’re lying.

Other scientists are decoding our desires and exploring the difference between our

conscious and unconscious mind. But can you really trust the technology?

Other searching questions are raised in the program notes, and more games:

Find out if you’ve got what it takes to be a modern-day spy in this new interactive family

exhibition. After being recruited as a trainee spy, explore the skills and abilities required by

real agents and use some of the latest technologies that help spies gather and analyse

information. Later go on and discover what it’s like to be spied upon. Uncover a secret store

of prototype gadgets that give you a glimpse into the future of spy technologies and finally

use everything you’ve learnt to escape before qualifying as a fully-fledged agent!

There were also demonstrations of grateful paraplegics and quadriplegics showing how the

gods of science have so unselfishly liberated them from their prisons: this was the serious

Nobel Prize side of the show. But there was no-one representing Her Majesty’s government

to demonstrate how these very same devices[3] can be used quite freely, and with relative

ease, in our wireless age[4], to conduct experiments on free-ranging civilians tracked

anywhere in the world, and using an infinitely extendable form of electrode which doesn’t

require visible contact with the scalp at all. Electrodes, like electricity, can also take an

invisible form – an electrode is a terminal of an electric source through which electrical

energy or current may flow in or out. The brain itself is an electrical circuit. Every brain has

its own unique resonating frequency. The brain is an infinitely more sensitive receiver and

transmitter than the computer, and even in the wireless age, the comprehension of how

wireless networks operate appears not to extend to the workings of the brain. The

monotonous demonstration of scalps with electrodes attached to them, in order to

demonstrate the contained conduction of electrical charges, is a scientific fatuity, in so far

as it is intended to demonstrate comprehensively the capability of conveying charges to the

brain, or for that matter, to any nerve in the body, as a form of invisible torture.

As Neurobotics claims: ‘Your brain is amazing’, but the power and control over brains and

nervous systems achieved by targeting brain frequencies with radiowaves must have been

secretly amazing government scientists for many years. The problem that now arises, at the

point of readiness when so much has been achieved, is how to put the technology into

action in such a way, as it will be acceptable in the public domain. This requires getting it

through wider government and legal bodies, and for that, it must be seen to spring from the

unbiased scientific investigations into the workings of the brain, in the best tradition of the

leading universities. It is given over to Dr Rees and his colleague, Professor Haynes,

endowed with the disclosure for weightier Guardian readers, to carry the torch for the

government. Those involved may also have noted the need to show the neuroscientist in a

more responsible light, following US neuroengineer for government sponsored Lockheed

Martin, John Norseen’s, ingenuous comment, in 2000, about his belief about the

consequences of his work in fMRI:

‘If this research pans out’, said Norseen, ‘you can begin to manipulate what someone is

thinking even before they know it.’ And added: “The ethics don’t concern me, but they

should concern someone else.”

While the neuroscientists report their discovery (without even so much as the specific

frequency of the light employed by this scanner/torch), issuing ethical warnings while

incongruously continuing with their mind-blowing work, the government which sponsors

them, remains absolutely mute. The present probing of people’s intentions, minds,

background thoughts, hopes and emotions[5] is being expanded into the more complex and

subtle aspects of thinking and feeling. We have, however, next to no technical information

about their methods. The description of ‘shining a torch around the brain’ is as absurd a

report as one could read of a scientific endeavour, especially one that carries such

enormous implications for the future of mankind. What is this announcement, with its

technical obfuscation, preparing us for?

Writing in Wired[6] contributing editor Steve Silberman points out that the lie-detection

capability of fMRI is ‘poised to transform the security system, the judicial system, and our

fundamental notions of privacy’. He quotes Cephos founder, Steven Laken, whose

company plans to market the new technology for lie detection. Laken cites detainees held

without charge at Guantanamo Bay as a potential example. ‘If these detainees have

information we haven’t been able to extract that could prevent another 9/11, I think most

Americans would agree that we should be doing whatever it takes to extract it’. Silberman

also quotes Paul Root Wolpe, a senior fellow at the Center for Bioethics at the University of

Pennsylvania, who describes the accelerated advances in fMRI as ‘ a textbook example of

how something can be pushed forward by the convergence of basic science, the

government directing research through funding, and special interests who desire a

particular technology’. Are we to believe that with the implied capability to scan jurors’

brains, the judiciary, the accused and the defendant alike, influencing[7] one at the expense

of the other, that the legal implications alone of mind-accessing scanners on university

campuses, would not rouse the Minister for Justice from his bench to say a few words about

these potential mind weapons?

So what of the ethical debate called for by the busy scientists and the Guardian’s science

reporter?[8] Can this technology- more powerful in subverting thought itself than anything in

prior history – really be confined to deciding whether the ubiquitously invoked terrorist has

had the serious intention of blowing up the train, or whether it was perhaps a foolish prank

to make a bomb out of chapatti flour? We can assume that the government would certainly

not give the go-ahead to the Science Museum Exhibition, linked to Imperial College, a major

government-sponsored institution in laser-physics, if it was detrimental to surveillance

programs. It is salutary to bear in mind that government intelligence research is at least ten

years ahead of any public disclosure. It is implicit from history that whatever affords the

undetectable entry by the gatekeepers of society into the brain and mind, will not only be

sanctioned, but funded and employed by the State, more specifically by trained operatives

in the security forces, given powers over defenceless citizens, and unaccountable to

them.[9]

The actual technology which is now said to be honing the technique ‘to distinguish between

passing thoughts and genuine intentions’ is described by Professor John-Dylan Haynes in

the Guardian in the most disarmingly untechnical language which must surely not have

been intended to enlighten.

The Guardian piece ran as follows:

A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows

them to look deep inside a person’s brain and read their intentions before they act.

The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists’ ability to probe people’s minds

and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading

technology may be used in the future.

‘Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out

something that from the outside there’s no way you could possibly tell is in there. It’s like

shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall,’ said John-Dylan Haynes at the Max

Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, who led the study

with colleagues at University College London and Oxford University.

We know therefore that they are using light, but fMRI has been used for many years to

attempt the unravelling of neuronal activity, and while there have been many efforts to

record conscious and unconscious processes, with particular emphasis on the visual cortex,

there has been no progress into consciousness itself. We can be sure that we are not being

told the real story.

Just as rats and chimpanzees have been used to demonstrate findings from remote

experiments on humans, electrode implants used on cockroaches to remotely control them,

lasers used to steer fruit-flies[10] [11], and worms engineered so that their nerves and

muscles can be controlled with pinpricks of light[12], the information and techniques that

have been ruthlessly forged using opportunistic onslaughts on defenceless humans as

guinea pigs – used for myriad purposes from creating 3D haptic gloves in computer games

to creating artificial intelligence to send visual processing into outer space – require

appropriate replication for peer group approval and to meet ethical demands for scientific

and public probity.

The use of light to peer into the brain is almost certainly that of terahertz, which occurs in

the wavelengths which lie between 30mm and 1mm of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Terahertz has the ability to penetrate deep into organic materials, without (it is said) the

damage associated with ionising radiation such as x-rays. It can distinguish between

materials with varying water content – for example fat versus lean meat. These properties

lend themselves to applications in process and quality control as well as biomedical

imaging. Terahertz can penetrate bricks, and also human skulls. Other applications can be

learnt from the major developer of terahertz in the UK, Teraview, which is in Cambridge,

and partially owned by Toshiba.

Efforts to alert human rights’ groups about the loss of the mind as a place to call your own,

have met with little discernible reaction, in spite of reports about over decades of the

dangers of remote manipulation using technology to access the mind[13], Dr Nick Begich’s

book, Controlling the human mind[14], being an important recent contribution. A different

approach did in fact, elicit a response. When informed of the use of terahertz at Heathrow

and Luton airports in the UK to scan passengers, the news that passengers would be

revealed naked by a machine which looked directly through their clothes produced a small,

but highly indignant, article in the spring 2007 edition of the leading human rights

organisation, Liberty.[15] If the reading of the mind met with no protest, seeing through

one’s clothes certainly did. It seems humans’ assumption of the mind as a private place has

been so secured by evolution that it will take a sustained battle to convince the public that,

through events of which we are not yet fully informed, such former innocence has been

lost.

Trained light, targeted atomic spectroscopy, the use of powerful magnets to absorb

moisture from human tissues, the transfer of radiative energy – these have replaced the

microwave harassment which was used to transmit auditory messages directly into the

hearing.[16] With the discovery of light to disentangle thousands of neurons and encode

signals from the complex circuitry of the brain, present programs will not even present the

symptoms which simulated schizoid states. Medically, even if terahertz does not ionise, we

do not yet know how the sustained application of intense light will affect the delicate

workings of the brain and how cells might be damaged, dehydrated, stretched, obliterated.

This year, 2007, has also brought the news that terahertz lasers small enough to

incorporate into portable devices had been developed.[17]

Sandia National Laboratories in the US in collaboration with MIT have produced a

transmitter-receiver (transceiver) that enables a number of applications. In addition to

scanning for explosives, we may also assume their integration into hand-held

communication systems. ‘These semiconductor devices have output powers which

previously could only be obtained by molecular gas lasers occupying cubic meters and

weighing more than 100kg, or free electron lasers weighing tons and occupying buildings.’

As far back as 1996 the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board predicted that the

development of electromagnetic energy sources would ‘open the door for the development

of some novel capabilities that can be used in armed conflict, in terrorist/hostage situations,

and in training’ and ‘new weapons that offer the opportunity of control of an adversary …

can be developed around this concept’.[18]

The surveillance technology of today is the surveillance of the human mind and, through

access to the brain and nervous system, the control of behaviour and the body’s functions.

The messaging of auditory hallucinations has given way to silent techniques of influencing

and implanting thoughts. The development of the terahertz technologies has illuminated the

workings of the brain, facilitated the capture of emitted photons which are derived from the

visual cortex which processes picture formation in the brain, and enabled the

microelectronic receiver which has, in turn, been developed by growing unique semi-

conductor crystals. In this way, the technology is now in place for the detection and reading

of spectral ‘signatures’ of gases. All humans emit gases. Humans, like explosives, emit their

own spectral signature in the form of a gas. With the reading of the brain’s electrical

frequency, and of the spectral gas signature, the systems have been established for the

control of populations – and with the necessary technology integrated into a cell-phone.

‘We are very optimistic about working in the terahertz electromagnetic spectrum,’ says the

principal investigator of the Terahertz Microelectronics Transceiver at Sandia: ‘This is an

unexplored area, and a lot of science can come out of it. We are just beginning to scratch

the surface of what THz can do to improve national security’.

Carole Smith was born and educated in Australia, where she gained a Bachelor of Arts

degree at Sydney University. She trained as a psychoanalyst in London where she has had

a private practice. In recent years she has been a researcher into the invasive methods of

accessing minds using technological means, and has published papers on the subject. She

has written the first draft of a book entitled: “The Controlled Society”.

NOTES

[1] http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/antenna/neurobotics/private/121.asp

At the time of writing it is still accessible. The exhibition ran from October 2006 to April

2007.

[2] Where are the scanners? Who controls them? Are they guarded by police to avoid them

being stolen by terrorists? How many are they in number? Are they going into mass

production? Do we have any say about their deployment? It is perhaps not unduly paranoid

to want to have some answers to these questions.

[3] There is insufficient space here to deal with microchips, the covert implantation of radio

transmitting devices which were referred to in Senator Glenn’s extraordinary speech to

Congress on the occasion of his attempt to introduce the Human Research Subject

Protection Act in 1997:

http://www.ahrp.org/InformedConsent/glennConsent.php

[4] Ref: The Coming Wireless revolution: When Everything Connects: The Economist: 26

April 2007.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=9080024

[5] Guardian: ‘The Brain Scan that can read people’s intentions’: 9 February

2007.www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,2009229,00.html

[6] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/lying_pr.html

[7] I say, ‘influencing’, advisedly since the technology that enables thoughts to be accessed,

certainly also allows for the dulling of mental processes, the interference of memory, the

excitation of mental or bodily processes, the infliction of pain on any organ or nerve, the

increase of blood pressure, breathing or the slowing down of these, as well as the activation

of rage, sadness, hysteria, or inappropriate behaviour. Ref:John Norseen’s work: Images of

Mind: The Semiotic Alphabet. The implantation of silent messages, experienced as

thoughts arising in the mind, is now possible.

[8] Despite three letters to the Guardian science correspondent, and Editor, I had no reply

from them, having asked them to consider my points, as psychoanalyst and researcher, for

the ethical debate which was called for. Nor was there any response from my approach to

the Cambridge ethicists and scientists who were said to be forming a committee. I have

seen no correspondence nor reference to the whole matter since February, 2007. There

was some marked regression in theNew Scientist about worms being used for experiments

for remote control

See: Douglas Fox, ‘Remote Control Brains: a neuroscience revolution’, New Scientist, 18

July 2007.

[9] The covert action group in the newly formed CIA recommended to President Eisenhower

in 1954 that the US must pursue “a fundamentally repugnant philosophy”, and that they

must learn to “subvert, sabotage and destroy” its enemies by “more clever and more

ruthless methods” than those of its opponents:

Ref: James Doolittle et al: “The Central Intelligence Agency: History and Documents

(Univ.Alabama Press, 1984.

[10] Fruit flies share to a remarkable degree, the DNA of humans.

[11] Fruit Flies and You: NASA sends fruit flies into Space:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/03feb_fruitfly.htm

[12] Ref: New Scientist, 18 July 2007: ‘Remote Control Brains: a neuroscience revolution’:

http://www.science.org.au/nova/newscientist/040ns_003.htm

[13] See author’s paper: http://www.btinternet.com/~psycho_social/Vol3/V3.html

[14] Nick Begich, Controlling the human mind: the technologies of political control or tools

for peak performance, Earthpulse Press Publications.

[15] Liberty, and Lawyers for Liberty have staunchly maintained a thorough-going campaign

against the protracted government plan to issue biometric ID cards, taking the case to the

House of Lords where they have gained support. In view of the undisclosed work being

carried out which will enable direct access to the brain through the technology coming to

light, and using light, one cannot but suspect that the biometric ID card is but an adjunct to

the tracking and data sourcing of citizens, and as such has fulfilled the function of a very

effective smokescreen, having deflected the energies of the protectors of individual liberties

in terms of thousands of hours of concentrated protest effort, with enormous expenditure

spent on their campaign.

[16] Human subjects, once computers for research experiments program them, remain

targeted, even if the original reasons for their usage have become obsolete. Some have

been continuously abused for over thirty years.

[17] Thz Lasers Small Enough for Screening Devices:

www.photonics.com/content/ news/2007/February/7/86317.aspx

http://www.whatsnextnetwork.com/technology/index.php/2007/01/23/miniaturized_terahertz

_transmitter_recei

[18] http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/vistas/vistas.htm